AOPA Pilot Magazine - February 2017 - 18

PROFICIENT PILOT

Too much of a good thing

BY BARRY SCHIFF

Teaching with alphabet soup

BARRY SCHIFF

has been an active
flight instructor
(with seven ratings)
since he was 18
and has a teaching
credential in aerospace issued by the
California Department of Education.

18 | AOPA PILOT February 2017

A MNEMONIC IS A MEMORY DEVICE that helps us to
recall larger amounts of information, especially lists of
things. The earliest mnemonic I can remember learning
was "whiplash." By eliminating the h's, you are left with
WIPLAS, letters intended to remind those in my high
school physics class that the six simple machines are
the Wedge, the Inclined plane, the Pulley, the Lever, the
Axle and wheel, and the Screw. This mnemonic made
such an indelible impression that I remember it easily
60 years later. Perhaps that is because this was the first
such memory device I was taught.
I learned two more mnemonic devices during my
early flight lessons-CIGAR (Controls, Instruments,
Gasoline, Alignment, and Run-up) and GUMP
(Gasoline, Undercarriage, Mixture, and Propeller)-
mental checklists used before takeoff and landing in
the simple airplanes of the early 1950s. Ground school
then taught that "true virgins make dull company," a
mnemonic used to sort out the arithmetic manipulation
of true heading, variation, magnetic heading, deviation,
and compass heading. "Can ducks make vertical turns?"
applies to making the same calculations in reverse. It
seems that we needed only a few more memory aids
such as "east is least and west is best" for dealing with
magnetic variation, and that was about it. Each phrase
made sense, was useful, and came easily to mind.
In recent years, however, the FAA began using
mnemonics in a big way, and introduced more such
devices than might be needed or make sense. The
first of these "modern" mnemonics may be I'M SAFE,
which is not bad. It represents a pilot's personal preflight checklist: "Illness, Medication, Stress, Alcohol,
Fatigue, and Emotion," although many argue that a
pilot should know intuitively and without this checklist whether he is fit to fly.
A hot topic, risk management, was introduced
more recently. Although a worthy area of study, the
way it is sometimes taught seems to obfuscate the subject. If you have not yet been introduced to the "3-P
Risk Management Process," you are going to really love
this [he says facetiously]:
You first need to know the three Ps of risk management: "Perceive hazards, Process this to evaluate the
level of risk, and Perform risk management."
With respect to perceiving a hazard (the first P),
you are supposed to use the PAVE checklist: "Pilot,
Aircraft, enVironment, and External pressures,"

categories to which most risks can be assigned.
You then should Process (the second P) any potential hazard using the CARE checklist: "What are the
Consequences? What are the available Alternatives?
What is the Reality of the situation? What kind of
External pressures are affecting my thinking?" After
a hazard or risk has been identified, the pilot must
then Perform (the third P) by using the ME checklist:
"Mitigate or Eliminate the risk." ME can be expanded
to TEAM: "Transfer the risk; Eliminate the risk; Accept
the risk; Mitigate the risk." The choice of ME or TEAM
presumably is up to you.
It seems to me that if a potential threat develops in
flight, the time it takes to extricate these checklists from
our memory and then apply them in the proper manner
might take more time than would be needed to simply
resolve the problem in the first place. I would like to
suggest a much better method of coping with a developing risk. Use the WUADSAI (pronounced woo-AD-sigh)
checklist: "Wake Up And Do Something About It."
Student pilots are really being taught this psychobabble. Presumably, we're supposed to know it as well.
But hang on. There is more. Aeronautical decision
making (ADM) instructs us to use DECIDE, an appropriate-sounding word intended to help us remember
the steps needed to make a decision: "Detect that
something has happened; Estimate the need to react;
Choose a desirable outcome; Identify the actions to
be taken; Do take those actions; Evaluate the effects
of the action."
If DECIDE doesn't suit your needs, you might prefer OODA, an abbreviated method of decision-making:
"Observe available information; Orient (analyze) this
information and use it to update your reality; Decide
on a course of action; Act on your decision."
I cannot decide whether DECIDE or OODA results
in the best decisions, which might be a fault in my own
decision-making ability. I do apologize for what might
seem to be a disparaging attitude toward this subject,
but I do not believe that this is an effective way to teach
common sense and good judgment-especially without
boring the student to death in the process.
Mnemonics are wonderful memory aids, but reliance
on those that are not particularly memorable or useful
in the first place is probably self-defeating.
AOPA
WEB

www.barryschiff.com

http://www.barryschiff.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - February 2017